h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Techcrunch.com is running a story called Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer where it's revealed that Automattic has turned down a large acquisition offer from a yet unknown source. I made a rather long winded comment on it, but decided that this warranted a post of its own here on my site, so here it is in its whole glory:

As interesting as this might be, the speculation is regarding Automattic and Wordpress.com not the Wordpress codebase. There is, or at least should be, a difference there.

Claiming this as “A great confirmation to the open source business model.” as Tim does above doesn’t really hold water though, as wordpress.com isn’t open source. The service is based on open source software, but Wordpress.com isn’t open source in itself. Sure, some of the work being done by Automattic trickles back to the Wordpress code base but thats being done on a case-by-case basis.

Everyone could potentially set up a service like Wordpress.com, based on any given open source platform, and make a bundle on it. While I applaud entrepreneurs who are able pull it off like this, this doesn’t have much to do with open source as much as it has to do with timing and providing a service people want.

In many ways, Wordpress.com isn’t much more open source than Facebook is, the only real difference is that the core service on Wordpress.com is based on a open source platform.

In my view this even further highlights the problem with differentiating Wordpress.com/Automattic (the business side) and Wordpress.org (The open source project).